Chip, fish with identity crisis

Given time to pause, I find it strange to reflect on how much my life has changed in the past couple of years. We bought a fish for the apartment a few weeks ago, well, actually two fish, and demise of one has caused a degree of anxiety about the well-being of the other. They’re only fish after all, a commodity like any other, but when they start to become a pet it’s natural to think of their well-being.

I think I read somewhere that New Zealanders (and wealthy countries in general), spend billions per annum on their pets. It’s annoying that one 5cm long Shubunkin goldfish has vaulted me into that demographic. This website states that Shubunkin are one of the toughest goldfish types, but I don’t believe it. That first goldfish died within three days of bringing the little eight-dollar son of a bitch home…

Back in Melbourne the ‘purchase of fish as low-cost pets experiment’ was also undertaken, mostly to provide a degree of calm to my small office. The demise of a fish was a serious financial set-back in those days. After I’d driven out to who in the hell knows where and bought the fish, the water softener, the special plastic piping for syphoning the water out of the (inexpensive) bowl I got from a junk shop, the food, the weed, and the little net for catching the darting little buggers, I had shelled out a fair whack of cash. Having a damn fish die after I’d gone to all this hassle to make life lovely for them was also a slap in the face. And yes, a slap in the face with a tiny fish, with all it’s pythonesque overtones.

Mostly the Melbourne experiment involved getting too excited about creating the little aquatic habitat and buying too many fish. There were a bunch of some kind of darty, flashy little bastards, and two conventional goldfish that ended up looking like orange behemoths by comparison. Problem was, the darty fish made one of the goldies nervous, so whenever they flicked off to a corner after getting a fright the fat guy would waddle off to the nearest bit of weed and hide too. This inevitably made the other goldy nervous, and I spent half my time with two sets of eyes peering at me from the concave sections of the circular bowl. It was unnerving in the extreme.

What I hadn’t fully grasped at the time was that goldfish are highly social. I’d always bought into the old “memory of a goldfish” theory, and assumed that having goldfish would be like watching a bunch of half-cut petit-bourgeois circulating at a cocktail party. All “Oh hi! Haven’t seen you for ages!” and “Hello! Have we met!” every three seconds. Well, turns out that this isn’t true.

Being the decreasingly proud owner of a habitat of paranoid fish made me resolve to remedy the situation, so I built a outdoor goldfish pond and separated the two goldies. I also transferred the darting ones outside because they had started to piss me off. I wanted calm, and I was getting rush-hour traffic. And, unsurprisingly, it worked. The nervous fish liked the deeper water where it could only be seen from above, and could easily hide, the darting fish all died (bye bye $$), and the remaining goldfish was a calm as a cucumber. It would just flounder about on the water, wait to be fed, and generally take life easy.

So, I shipped the fish-bowl and some of the gear back to New Zealand with me when I returned, but it’s only been recently that I’ve been able to justify the readies to spend on something as frivolous as pets. Like I say, they’re expensive little bastards. We bought two fish, named one each, and one carked it immediately. This leaves us with one fish. And he’s as cute as a button.

Hold on, going to pause writing to get up and check he’s still swimming. Brb.

OK, sweet as. I couldn’t imagine trying to explain how he had been a great fish…

Thing is, he’d been spending an extraordinary amount of time breathing at the surface of the bowl of late, and we were worried he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I’d changed the water, so we knew it wasn’t too much nitrogen in the water. I wouldn’t have worried too much, but he’s a fish with an extreme amount of personality. Seriously. When you walk near his bowl, he swims up to the glass to see you, and kind of “wags his tail”. You can put your finger against the glass and he tries to nibble it, and if you move the finger a little, he’ll follow it.

How could we let a fish as cute as that die?

And here’s where the lifestyle change kicks in. One trip to the pet store later and I’m walking out with $40 worth of water softener and an electric air pump to make sure the little guy is getting enough oxygen in his water. FORTY BUCKS. In other words, more than I used to spend on a week’s groceries in Melbourne. And I didn’t even think twice about it. And all to spoil a wee goldfish because I think he thinks he’s a puppy.

I think that I’m the petite-bourgois! God knows I saw enough of them out by Animates. La Cloche for brunch, dahlinks?

My older daughter wanted fish, so my husband suggested she start saving up for some (at age 4). She did, but when she got to about $25, she sat at the lunch table one day, and said, “Mummy and Daddy. I have changed my mind about fish. I’m going to get something else with my money, and you won’t like it.”

“Hmmmm,” I thought. We had told her that we didn’t like Barbies, and that we would not get her one. “That child is going to get herself a Barbie.” We already had a mini Barbie, courtesy of an axis of evil between Mattel and the Golden Arches, but at that time, no big Barbies. So off our daughter went, with her father’s assistance, to get herself a Barbie. So much for the ban. OTOH, the ban came in handy for reinforcing the Santa Claus myth, when we pointed out to our younger daughters that Santa must be true, because we would never have gotten them Barbies.

But I digress. Back to fish.

When we moved to Wellington, as part of the consolation activity (for moving from Palmerston North to Wellington!), we finally got a fish tank, and four little rocket fish. The first one died while my mother was looking after the girls, so she carefully buried it in the garden with three fascinated children in attendance. There followed electric pumps, water softener, more fish, bigger tank, another electric pump, dead fish, flushed down the toilet to join Nemo (though how they would do that in state of rigor mortis was something we didn’t talk about with the girls), different food, more fish, dead fish, in a never ending cycle. I learned much more about keeping fish healthy than I ever wanted to know.

Eventually we started afresh, with three Shubunkin fish. The two bigger fish promptly monstered the smaller one to death, so it was down the toilet for him.

Then one of the remaining fish began to exhibit very odd behaviour. He would float upside down in the tank, moving his gills, flickering his tail, and then coming back to life, and behaving normally for a few days. We noticed that he would come back to life when the second fish nudged him. So their names were obvious. Lazarus and Jesus (pronounced Hey-Zeus) did this for several weeks, until eventually even divine power couldn’t help Lazarus, and down the toilet he went. Hey-Zeus pined for a couple of weeks, and then off he went too.